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[FINISHED] The outcast sea: full stilized UE4 environment

greentooth
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simonBreumier greentooth
Hi :)
During the last month, I started working on my first full environment as a side-project and figured it would be a good time to start posting my progress to get feedbacks and review what I've done (it's a good way to stay motivated).
My goal was to learn Unreal engine and try to gather in a single art piece everything I've learned since I started 3D art last january (prop modeling, texturing, composition, lighting...).

Since I wanted to practice my ability to make lots of stylized props in a small amount fo time, as well as learning lighting in Unreal, I decided to make an indoor environment. As I was scrolling my artstation, I felt on this awesome concept by Arthus Pilorget, which has been reproduced several time ever since and decided to go for a boat interior scene.

The plot is a following: Life on the ground has become unlivable for many reasons urging the main protagonist to start leaving on the sea as an outcast. As he cannot go back on the ground he had to make the boat as livable and cosy as possible, and to find ways to cope with lonelyness.

Here are a few unreal renders of my current progress:



And to give a better idea of what the final results will be, a few pictures of my final blockout:



As I'm a mechanical engineer (yet aspiring environment/prop artist), I figured it would be fun to design several DIY stuff the main protagonist had to do to make his ship more comfy:
- Wave generated electricity
- Solar heated furnace (this one might be hard to catch in the renders)
- Mini-fishing dock at the rear
- rope system to manage the sails without having to go outside (to be done)
- Several handcrafted furnitures

I gathered a load of references on boats, stylized arts and DIY projects, blocked out everything inside blender directly and very quickly exported everything into UE4 to start lighting and walking around the level (to see if everything was actually walkable).
My main concern at this step was to fix the basic shapes as I wanted to go for a stylized look.
Following the advices given in this great NoMoreGrid tutorial, I wanted the shapes alone to guide the player's view on what's important (cables converging to the fridge, beams slightly inclined to point the scale that goes at the second floor, Library with a slope guiding to the boat wheel).
To increase the stylized look, I also setup a black outline post procee right at the blockout process (following this UE4 training video).

I decided to add a focus point on each part of the boat to guide the story telling:
- Planks closing the rear of the boat to prevent him from looking behind
- Wheels generating electricity at the rear
- Fridge powered by the wheels to indicate the time-zone the story takes place in and create a contrast with all the other hand-made stuff (also, having a fridge on a boat is kinda absurd given the power it consumes but that's the funny "shut up its magic" fact)
- book, on the table (a potential save point for a game): a diary to balance the protagonist lonelyness. This one was not planed at the begining but I took part in the CGBoost Magic Book challenge and worked 2 days straight on a detailed book asset and figured afterwards it would fit well in this environment.
- Scale leading to the second floor: a way to escape the enclosure of the boat, to see the horizon
- A secret door at the front of the boat that leads to a mysterious place (no. it's not the toilet.)
Planing those focus point at the very begining really drove the way I chose every shapes and lighting and also determined which assets would be hero props requiring to spend time on.

Once I felt satisfied with the blockout I divided everything in four different blender files:
- Structural assets: walls, floors, every modular assets that would make the boat structure
- Small props (nets, buckets, barrels, compas, books...)
- Furnitures
- Hero props
I started with the structural parts and the bigger props to quickly add the big shapes of the environment and have a better idea of how it would look like in the end. Also at this stage I decided what kind of materials I wanted. I experimented a little on substance designer and came out with the following material that I used for the floors, walls, roofs and parts of the furnitures:


The amount of Lichen and nailed planks is a parameter that can be adjusted, as well as the wood saturation to represent variations due to humidity. All these parameters will be usefull for vertex painting and adding little variations in the level once I've finished all the assets. This made the process of the modular parts very quick. To add more interest without relying to heavily on tesselation height, I changed the mesh of the floor asset to emphasize the planks' twisted geometry:



Each asset was then modeled in blender, then quickly sculpted in Zbrush and textured in substance. For most "non-hero" props, I made a few smart materials at the begining that I reused heavily to keep constistency over the process. For texturing, one of my main concern was to keep a constant texel density over the whole level, as I opted for a first person environment (silly me). I followed the guideline detailed in this guide by Leonardo Iezzi and relied heavily on the great Texel Density Cheker add-on for blender by Ivan Vostrikov.

I did the asset one by one and positioned it right away in the environment as I found it more motivating to see the environment building itself step by step. Sometimes, it meant pausing the modeling process for a few hours to add a particle effects, post processing or move light a bit but it really kept me going, even knowing that it wouldn't be the final lighting setup.

This project already taught me a lot of things on the environment making process and I had lot of fun thinking about the story behind it.
My next steps will be to finish the small props and hero props, Vertex paint the wood texture to add more variations and work a bit more on shading/VFX effects in UE4 (the sea, particularily, has yet received 0 min of my attention, but I've seen lots of stylized ocean shading tutorials realeased recently and can't wait to experiment with that), and make the whole structure follow the wave movement (no idea how to do that yet).

My sole regret up to now is that I haven't used any trim sheet: given the large number of wood objects in the environement, sculpting a few high quality wood planks at the begining would have definitely been a time-saver, but I think I had too many things to figure out for a first environment to jump right into that.

I'll keep updating my progress,
Tell me what you think :)

Replies

  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    Finally got the time to get back to it and made a few detailed assets for the boat kitchen

    model

    And here's the result in the environment !


    I also started messing arround with Designer to enrich the material base I use, I'll post some results later :)
  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    Small update, I made a first pass on the electricity generator wheels and made a quick turning animation, here's an in-game view:

  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    Made a little oil lamp to enlight the scene and enforce the cosy/mystery atmosphere :3
    Then I had a little fun and plugged a perlin noise on the fire emissiveness to make it a bit more alive:

    Tell me what you think :) !
  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    And finally made the wave-powered fish fridge !


    And an in-game view:

    It took me a while to figure how I wanted it textured as the stylized fridge reference I've found all had pretty simple textures with often nothing more than a single color + a gradient + low roughness values.
    next step: I'll start adding some decals and try reworking on lighting a bit

    Hope you like it !
  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    I wanted to populate the environment with several different maps, as the outcast sailor has to find his way in the vast oceans.
    So I made a quick Stylized map substance designer material to quicly generate different maps using only planes in UE4.
    Here's the result in game:

    And here's the node setup:

    I've uploaded it on substance share, in case it could be of use to anyone: https://share.substance3d.com/libraries/6757
  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    Finished adding a few more details, small props, vertex painted most walls and floors to break tiling a bit and made another light pass.
    Here's a video showing a few paning shots:


    I'm satisfied at a few places but I still feel some parts of the environment are a bit borring to the eye, and that I should add more small shapes/story telling elements (while keeping places for the eye to rest).

    However I've been in it too much lately and I can't see anything anymore, so any outside look feedback could help <3
    Hope you'll like it :)
  • scottycharly
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    scottycharly polycounter lvl 10
    Being an electrical engineer turned professional 3D artist about 8 years ago, I wholeheartedly wish you luck on your professional project to become a professional props artist.

    This project is very nice. There are two suggestions I would make:

    1) Most of your wood beams or plank are warped, and it's a nice part of the look you created, but in some cases, I feel it's too much and out of tune with the rest of your environment. I would keep the warping more subtle.



    2) The overall look of your environment is very noisy because everything is made of detailed planks of wood, all of the same color too. I would switch the materials of some elements with something flatter and with a different color so that it's easier to read the volumes and more soothing to the eyes. For example, the walls could be in a light grey concrete/plaster kind of material. You could also make the floor darker or lighter than the rest.

    Keep on the good work!

  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    @scottycharly thanks a lot for the feedback!
    It gave me several ideas. Since it's an experimental project, I'll try different materials for the walls and roofs such as painted wood (could be vertex painted at some places to reveal the wood) or metal.
  • Mazzletov
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    Mazzletov polycounter lvl 2
    Great workflow and insight on your process. I would suggest you add the swaying effect (especially the "yaw"-moition) of the boat on your props. The pitch of the ship will be neglectable due to absent waves. Everything is constantly moving, very subtly but it will give much more atmosphere that you are on a squeaking and living ship. Worked 4 years in the nautical offshore engineering business :)

    As an extra I would add sausages, fish or dried plants hanging from the ceiling.
  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    @Mazzletov thanks for these inputs, love the hanging sausages idea !
    For the swaying effect, I started making a few tests by just imposing a sin on the roll angle of a few objects and multiplying the sin amplitude by some random noise so that the swaying amplitude varies a bit, that should definitely add some atmosphere indeed !
  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    I've been messing arround with some cosine to add some swaying movement to a few objects.
    First, I've modeled a second lamp prop for the ceiling to add a bit more prop variations and redirect the shapes to the floor.
    For the swaying movement, I've tried to give it a natural look by adding different cosine with different periods (a global one disturbed by a few higher frequencies) both on the pitch and roll angles (to make the movement less rigid).
    It still looks a bit rigid to me but maybe I'm paying too much attention to it now.
    Here's an in-game render:

    and a quick view of the blueprint :

  • simonBreumier
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    simonBreumier greentooth
    I added a few more details here and there and tried to change some colors a bit to make the volumes stands out a bit more.
    I've tried replacing the walls and ceiling materials by something more homogeneous (like painted wood) but it felt kinda empty, maybe because I was too used to see all that noise.. so I decided to work on the color/lighting instead and rework on some shapes a bit.
    I'm calling it done for now as I've learned quite a lot of things already and need to move to something else, but I might come back to it in the future to experiment.
    A few renders:

    And a video showcasing the whole thing:

    More details on my artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/B1ekVr
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